Posted April 9, 202111:44 am
Written in Cleveland.com on 04/09/2021.
From free Wi-fi and public computers that help narrow the digital divide to rent-free meeting rooms for civic groups, local libraries have long embraced the role of trusted community convener — a mission that’s only become more essential during the global pandemic.
Like many institutions, libraries have been forced by the sustained shutdown of public life to re-examine service delivery, with a digital-first approach.
What hasn’t changed is libraries’ continued, shared commitment to partner with civil legal aid providers to help those facing eviction, foreclosure, domestic violence and other civil legal challenges who cannot afford to hire their own attorneys. (Unlike criminal law, there’s no constitutional right to an attorney in civil cases, and there is far more need and demand for help than legal aid can provide).
In Ohio, a 10-year-old partnership between the Cleveland Public Library and The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland connects volunteer lawyers, Legal Aid staff and law students at monthly, weekend clinics at library branches across the city.
Since the pandemic, those clinics have shifted to periodic Facebook Live Q-and-A sessions on topics including evictions, mental health and guardianship, driver’s license suspensions and immigration law.
The goal is to make the legal system more understandable, while equipping those who can’t afford their own lawyers with self-help tools and access to forms, reference books and other resources.
More library systems across the country are similarly adapting their own “Lawyer in the Library” programs for virtual audiences.
In Louisiana, the New Orleans Public Library partnered with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services in summer 2020 to offer free, twice-monthly virtual legal clinics to eligible, low-income library users.
That successful partnership led to expanded virtual collaborations with library systems in outlying parishes as well as in Baton Rouge -- in one instance saving a mother of four and her family from eviction while helping the woman collect more than $7,000 in unemployment benefits.
In Baltimore, a Lawyer in the Library program started in 2015 by the Enoch Pratt Free Library attracted as many as 600 to 700 clients a week pre-pandemic, aided by a volunteer staff of 200. That program too has shifted online.
Not all systems have been able to make the transition, though. In the Rockies, Denver-based Colorado Legal Services has had to put its outreach effort to library users in rural areas on hold.
With a shrinking lawyer population, nearly one-third of Colorado’s 64 counties have five or fewer registered attorneys — and those lawyers typically serve more than 100 clients. Three of those rural counties lack a single attorney, with another eight tallying just one lawyer who is most likely also the county judge.
At the federal Legal Services Corporation, the nation’s largest funder of civil legal aid, a national training initiative for public library staff called Creating Pathways to Civil Legal Justice has attracted nearly 1,400 participants (and nearly double the number of trained facilitators than anticipated) to the self-paced course.
In partnership with library training provider Web Junction, the free course aims to demystify legal issues among public library staff. As essential front-line workers, these folks can play a critical role in helping address an access to justice gap in which 86% of civil legal problems reported by low-income Americans in 2017 received inadequate or no legal help — a gap that the pandemic has likely widened.
During National Library Week this week, we proudly embrace the role of libraries as community connectors, as well what PBS NewsHour recently called the “last safe haven” for many amid the pandemic. That especially includes increasing access to justice at a moment in time when the threats of COVID-19 continue to hover.
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